St. Augustine Scouts mark 75 years of service to the community

To view more photos, please click here. To watch a video, click here

Posted

WEST WARWICK—As a member of Narragansett Council Troop 76, Leo McKenna remembers it as a soggy introduction to one of the most enjoyable aspects of scouting in August 1946.

The Boy Scout troop, from St. Augustine Church, Providence, arrived at Camp Yawgoog in southern Rhode Island for several days of hiking, fishing and telling stories by the campfire, but the weather was absolutely miserable. Driving rains had turned the rural landscape thick with mud.

The troop nonetheless made the best of a bad situation and came home from the trip with memories to last a lifetime. The experience also taught them a valuable lesson.

“The next year, we put wheels on our boxes,” said McKenna, 78, of the modifications the scouts made to their gear carriers to allow them to be transported more easily in the worst conditions Mother Nature could throw at them.

The lessons wouldn’t stop there.

McKenna, who would become a scout leader, and would one day get his own son and grandchildren involved as he launched a successful career in the business world of the Midwest, earned the title Life Scout. He has also been very active for the last 47 years as a member of the Knights of Columbus.

“I contribute a lot of the principles I learned in scouting to business and how I live my life,” said McKenna, who made the trip from Chicago to help the troop celebrate its 75th anniversary. He was the oldest scout from the troop to attend the celebration, which began on Aug. 22 with a Mass at St. Augustine Church and ended with a dinner and program at the West Valley Inn.

Values ingrained in scouts, such as honesty, integrity and reverence became the principles he would live his life by as he graduated from LaSalle Academy in 1951 and Providence College in 1955 with a degree in business administration.

A member of the ROTC, he served for two years as a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army, then as a member of the Army Reserve as he earned an MBA from Northwestern University.

“I did a lot of things with this troop. It was a great experience,” McKenna remembers.

Earlier, during the Mass at St. Augustine Church, celebrated by Father Angelo N. Carusi, the pastor of Blessed Sacrament Church, Providence, who also serves as diocesan chaplain for scouting, praised the scouts for their dedication to such a worthwhile organization.

“Troop 76 can look back on 75 years of moral character and personal courage,” said Father Carusi. “If every single person in the world would do what the Boy Scouts do, what a better world this would be.”

Troop 76 was formed as the nation was in the midst of the Great Depression.

At the time, Bishop Francis P. Keough began an aggressive program to establish Boy Scout troops in the parishes of the diocese.

On Nov. 30, 1936, the first charter was granted to St. Augustine Church to establish a Scout troop in the Elmhurst-Mount Pleasant neighborhood. Francis O’Reilly, a Providence police officer, was the first Scoutmaster and John Watters, the first committee chairman.

Not long after the troop’s founding, the nation began mobilizing for war. In 1939-1940, the council began training Scouts to be prepared for emergencies. In 1941, the older Scouts in each troop formed special emergency patrols. Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Scouts were on high alert to be prepared for calls to service. In 1942, the slogan was: “Toughen Up; Buckle Up; Carry On!”

Through the 1950s and 1960s—a time of growth in the neighborhood and parish, with strong interest in community involvement—the troop ran a successful program under a series of adult leaders. In the 1960s, with Al Spinella as scoutmaster, the troop became directly involved in the maintenance and improvement of the St. John Bosco Chapel at the camp. Through the years, the troop has continued to help care for the chapel, with the Scouts performing service projects around the chapel and its grounds every summer.

In 2010, on Scout is Reverent Sunday, the chapel’s bell tower was refurbished and rededicated under Troop Leader David Spinella.

Continuing in the family tradition of service to Scouting, David Spinella Jr., 16, the troop’s senior patrol leader, is well on his way to becoming an Eagle Scout.

“My dad, uncle and cousin have all been Eagle Scouts, and my grandfather was scoutmaster of Troop 76,” says the younger David, who just started his junior year at LaSalle Academy.

He has been involved in Scouting for seven years, beginning with the troop in his home parish of St. Thomas, Providence, before joining Troop 76 five years ago. He expects to reach the rank of Eagle by the time he graduates from LaSalle.

“I’ve given up a lot of time going out with friends but I love it, I wouldn’t give it up for anything,” he said of the time commitment, including many Friday night meetings, that he has made to Scouting through the years.

At 77, Richard Crook was the oldest Troop 76 Eagle Scout in attendance at the anniversary celebration, and the eighth from the troop ever to reach that esteemed rank.

“We had a pretty large troop: 60-70 scouts, eight patrols with as many as eight scouts in a patrol,” remembers Crook, who was in the troop for five years, from 1946-51, when he graduated from La Salle Academy. He would go on to graduate from Worcester Polytechnic Institute and go into business.

“It gave me an opportunity for leadership. The idea was that you were meant to lead people in doing things,” he said of the way his experiences prepared him for the positions he held through the years at Westinghouse and Textron.

Scoutmaster Frank Stroscio is proud to lead the two dozen members of Troop 76 at this point in its history.

“I can see there is really a cohesive structure built around this troop. They are learning good, moral values as scouts that they can’t get on the street,” he said.

Some of the older scouts even help the younger ones by serving as their merit badge counselors.

Dorothy Flaherty, the wife of assistant Scoutmaster Dennis Flaherty recalled with great pride the special trip her son James, an Eagle Scout, made about four years ago as a member of Troop 76. He is now a student at St. Anselm College.

“It was very rewarding seeing him grow as a person,” she said of a storied backpacking trip to Philmont, N.M. that many choose to make during their scouting years.

“It was an epic journey, he came back more mature. He knew that if he could do that, he could do anything.”

Scouts